George
W. Bush has famously expressed a certain contempt for history: “History?
We’ll all be dead.” A smirker’s philosophy in a nutshell. And yet he cared
enough about history to make Bob Woodward his official biographer. Shaping
opinion, now and if possible for all time, is a primary focus.

It’s only been a little over a month since
Hurricane Katrina hit, but already it is clear that the disaster was a
bonanza for those who are in the self-declared business of bending the
world to their reality. The world has indeed changed. As usual, active
efforts are being made by the Bushitters and the mainstream media to
prevent what we’ve just experienced from sinking in, while they bury the
truly significant aspects of the story and begin the long tedious process
of editing our memories. So I want to take a minute and look at three
altered or suppressed aspects of what we just witnessed and provide a
memory resource for the future.

Perhaps the
most under-reported aspect of Bush’s response relates to a memo
written by Michael Chertoff discussing the creation of a “White House Task
Force on Hurricane Katrina Response,” contravening the new 2005 National
Response Plan and previous executive orders by George Bush on the handling
of emergency situations. According to Knight-Ridder, which reported the
story, “the goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined
framework for delivering federal assistance when a disaster -- caused by
terrorists or Mother Nature -- is too big for local officials to handle.”
This means that the relief effort was not handled by disaster
professionals, as it should have been, but was run out of the White House.

Here’s a synopsis of how FEMA performed,
while acting under the White House’s direct supervision (With the
exception of the last item, all the FEMA links were compiled by
peabody71 on Democratic Underground.):

You can judge from the results what the
purpose of the Task Force might have been.

The second aspect of the story, having to do
with graft and profiteering, is one that has gotten more coverage, but is
still being distorted by Republican noise, beginning with Bush’s Katrina
do-over speech given in Jackson Square, New Orleans. Bush almost
immediately alluded to now
largely discredited accounts of black looting and violence, although,
ironically, he adopted en masse economic proposals on reconstruction put
out by
the Heritage Foundation, including the whole idea of a “Gulf Coast
Opportunity Zone.”

With an efficiency belying the
administration’s slowness in responding to human suffering,
Karl Rove oversaw the awarding of hundreds of millions in no-bid
reconstruction contracts within a few weeks. Maybe he was a little too
successful. Under pressure from Congress, the new director of FEMA has
promised to
reopen all no-bid contracts. Still, the fact that the favored
businesses are already on the scene gives the original contractors an edge
over all other comers. This is
a method they’ve successfully employed in the past, which is why I
won’t hold my breath waiting for Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor to be
replaced by local, cheaper contractors. The overwhelming majority of these
no-bid contracts went to
out-of-state companies, including an Alaskan firm with close ties to
Bush.

A lesser known push is for a giant housing
project involving the creation of trailer communities for evacuees, in
spite of
a large number of vacancies in available housing. In the past, housing
vouchers have been an efficient way to handle such a situation. According
to
Paul Krugman, the problem with vouchers, as far as Bush & Co. are
concerned, is not that they don’t work, but that they do.
FEMA says, “It may not be quite on the scale of building the pyramids,
but it’s close. This is big. We’ve never done anything like this.”

Building mobile-home communities also allows
the White House to choose new electoral districts for the displaced.
New Orleans Republican Craig Romero went to Washington immediately to
make the point that his district would go red if the blacks weren’t
allowed back. State officials in Louisiana say they are now “virtually
certain” they will lose a congressional seat, due to a drop in
population, with a concomitant drop in federal revenue. Louisiana could
easily go from Blue to Red, statewide and nationally.

Under Karl Rove, the reconstruction effort
has become a goldmine for numerous corporations via a legislative agenda
that includes:

Gutting
the Endangered Species Act. From now on, the government will pay
corporations for complying with provisions of the act.Richard
Pombo, Republican from California, seized the moment to relax rules on
offshore drilling on both coasts and to encourage oil-prospecting in the
Rocky Mountains.

Bush is calling for
entitlements to
be cut to pay for Katrina, at exactly the same time that taxes are
being cut -- again -- for the wealthiest fraction of one percent of
Americans. This time, billionaires are being “relieved” of the inheritance
tax, one of the last impediments to inter-generational concentration of
wealth.

Finally, to support this radical corporate
agenda, the Bushitters propose to amend the
Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting domestic use of the military. This, in
combination with the packing of the Supreme Court, may be the most ominous
structural change of all.

But the radical right was giddy with what
was accomplished even before the gravy began to flow.
Richard Baker, 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge, enthused, “We
finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but
God did.” Which brings me to the third suppressed aspect of media
coverage: the references to racial (and class) cleansing, both coded and
explicit.

For example,
Bill
Bennett joined in the high spirits on his radio show, spontaneously
introducing the extremely hypothetical and morally repugnant idea of
aborting black fetuses -- all of them, Condi -- in order to reduce the
crime rate.

Bush made a reference to the Great Flood in
his Jackson Square speech: “Along this coast, for mile after mile,” George
said, talking directly to his base, “the wind and water swept the land
clean.” In the Bible story, you’ll remember, God sent a Great Flood to
cleanse the land of sinners, who got what they deserved.

It all seems eerily reminiscent of a
strategy
Pat Robertson laid out all the way back in 1992:

The strategy against the American radical
left should be the same as General Douglas MacArthur employed against the
Japanese in the Pacific . . . bypass their strongholds, then surround
them, isolate them, bombard them, then blast the individuals out of their
power bunkers with hand-to-hand combat. The battle for Iwo Jima was not
pleasant, but our troops won it. The battle to regain the soul of America
won’t be pleasant either, but we will win it.

I think Robertson underestimates the
pleasure of the task for those who are performing it. It is by now
abundantly clear that “the American radical left” refers to those who
believe in Social Security and Medicaid every bit as much as gays and
abortionists. (In that regard, it’s interesting to note the recent opening
of a
museum near Cincinnati that “explains the post-Flood world . . . when
dinosaurs lived with man.” This “museum” is dedicated to the idea that
“the world and the universe are but 6,000 years old and that baby
dinosaurs rode in Noah’s ark.” There’s more than one way to isolate a
liberal.)

So when George W. Bush, fielding a
prearranged question, tells the nation that we may have
an avian flu pandemic that could require quarantines enforced by the
military, I sense another opportunity zone for the
fearmongers.
You’d have to stop the planes, so people can’t go out, Bush said in the
press conference, and use the military to prevent people going in.

What then? Use your imagination. Perhaps
there would be reports of civil unrest within the secured perimeters:
looting, rape, murder. Unlike the police, soldiers, as Kathleen Blanco so
eloquently warned, shoot to kill. Would armed troops go door to door
looking for the sick? What about food, water, medicine -- think all that
would arrive in a timely fashion? How much better are your odds if you
live in a Republican area?

I’m sure you can add to the list. The
important thing is that we don’t soften or forget what we have seen.

Patricia Goldsmith is a member of Long Island Media Watch, a
grassroots free media and democracy watchdog group. She can be reached
at: plgoldsmith@optonline.net.